The Language of Illness

Words, Emotional Distancing and Disease

Infected. Diseased. Sick. These are only a few of the many, many words called into service when speaking of diseases and other maladies. Have you noticed the shift in the way we think about people when their circumstances call for the use of such words?

Ask anyone with HIV, cancer, MS, ALS , hepatitus C— pick your condition — and they’ll surely tell you how everyone who finds out about their state of affairs takes a step back, away from them — frequently physically, but always mentally. Perhaps they fear for their own safety; they believe they’ll “catch it.” More likely, they have habitually adopted an attitude toward life that disregards its many unpleasantnesses. Even more important, they cannot comprehend their own impending ends, so they look away.

Or maybe what they deeply fear is what your illness has shown them about themselves, revealed their fear of becoming you, or someone like you, someone whose certain mortality has been revealed and timestamped. “Oh you poor thing,” they say, as they put down their coffee cup, or the fork they were eating with as you lunched together. Do they resent you a little, because you have interfered with their happiness? They move away from you an imperceptible (they think) inch, even though moments before you were playing music from the same song book, shoulder to shoulder, or going over the same material at work, or doing whatever you were so collegially doing together just before you let slip that you were a diseased one.

The next question is almost always, “How bad is it? How’d you get it?” What’s your dirty little secret? By the time the interrogation proceeds to this question, the “step away” has already happened.

How quickly the judgement is made!

It’s fast, almost instantaneous. You are now “the other,” no longer one of their tribe, but a shifty, dangerous, disrespectful foreigner, a sick one. They want to know how you…

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